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Chapter 72: Start Living in Insecurity

Osho,You said that love is possible only with death. Then will you please explain buddha’s love.

For an ignorant person love is always part of hate, it always goes with hate. For the ignorant mind hate and love are just two aspects of the same coin. For the ignorant mind love is never pure.

And that is the misery of love - because the hate becomes a poison. You love a person and you hate the same person also. But you may not be doing both simultaneously so you are not aware of it. When you love a person you forget about the hatred part, it goes below, it goes into the unconscious and it waits there. Then when your love is tired, it falls into the unconscious and the hate part comes up. Then you hate the same person.

And when you hate you are not aware that you also love - now the love has gone deep down into the unconscious. This goes on, just like night and day. It goes on moving in a circle. It becomes a misery.

But for a buddha, for one who is enlightened, the dichotomy, the dualism, disappears. Everywhere - not only as far as love is concerned - the whole life becomes a oneness. Then there is no dichotomy, the opposite doesn’t exist.

So really, to call Buddha’s love “love” is not good, but we have no other term. Buddha himself never used the word love. He used the word compassion. But that too is not very good. Because your compassion is always mixed with your cruelty, your non-violence is always mixed with your violence - whatsoever you do will have its opposite just nearby. You exist between contradictions; hence the tension, the anguish, the anxiety. You are not one; you are always two. You are a crowd, divided into many fragments, and those fragments are opposing each other. Your being is a tension; Buddha’s being is a deep relaxation. Remember, tension exists between two opposite poles, and relaxation is just in the middle, where two opposing poles are no longer opposing. They negate each other - and there is a transcendence. So Buddha’s love is basically different from what you know as love.

Your love is a dis-ease; Buddha’s love is total relaxation. There is no head part to it, so the quality of it changes completely. Many things will be in Buddha’s love which cannot be in ordinary love. First, it cannot be hot. The hotness comes from hate. It is not passion, rather it is compassion. It is not hot, it is cool. To us, a cool love means something which has gone wrong. Buddha’s love is cool, there is no heat to it. It is not like the sun, it is like the moon. It will not create passion in you, it will create a deep coolness.